Metro Detroit

DOWNLOADING GOD: Churches use podcasts to spread the gospel; faithful turn up volume

March 14, 2006

BY DAVID CRUMM

FREE PRESS RELIGION WRITER

Inverted Student Ministries records its Wednesday night worship service on March 8 for a podcast.

Sights and sounds of religious services

Many congregations across Michigan are experimenting with ways
to deliver the sights and sounds of their services far beyond their
houses of worship.

Some are designed for use by only members,
such as new toll-free telephone lines that involve a direct cost to the
congregation for each person who calls the number. Others are free to
the public. Here are a few:

Go to www.salineag.org to download audio podcasts of complete services for adults and youths at the Saline First Assembly of God.

Go to www.aodonline.org
and click on links to Together in Faith for audio podcasts about the
upcoming reorganization of local Catholic parishes or links to Lenten
materials for devotional podcasts designed to help Catholics prepare
for the coming of Easter.

DAVID CRUMM

Nineteen-year-old Josh DuBois recently started carrying a slice of his home church in his iPod wherever he goes.

Eighty-two-year-old
Herb Kaufman keeps the weekly services at Temple Beth El in Bloomfield
Township as close as the cell phone in his pocket.

Young and old,
Americans are using communications technology to stay linked to their
spiritual homes, even if they wind up scattered across the state or
country.

DuBois, a freshman at Michigan State University, lives an hour away from his hometown of Saline.

"I
like living up at MSU," DuBois said. But several times a week, he loads
the latest audio from services at Saline First Assembly of God into his
iPod, "and then it feels a little more like home up here," he said. "I
can get the latest podcast the day after services. It's so portable, I
can listen anywhere."

Podcasts can be downloaded from the Internet and listened to or viewed on a computer or portable device like an iPod.

Kaufman
and his wife, Babs, who flee Michigan's chill for southern California
for a few months each year, donated the new toll-free telephone system
to Temple Beth El.

Members who cannot make it to a service ask
the temple staff for a code. Then, just before the start of a weekly
service, a funeral or a wedding, they dial a toll-free number, punch in
the code and can listen to a live audio feed.

New microphones and
an amplifier Kaufman paid to have installed in Beth El's audio control
room allow telephone listeners to hear all aspects of a service clearly.

Kaufman,
the president of the Ira Kaufman Chapel, a funeral home in Southfield,
said he enjoys hearing weekly services, but the new system is
especially valuable for special occasions.

"I still remember the
day my sister Jean Sucher in Scottsdale, Ariz., could listen through
the telephone as the name of her husband, Gerald, who died last year,
was read aloud in the service ... as a memorial," Kaufman said. "That
connection was very, very emotional for my sister and myself."

These
new communications tools are hot news in the congregations using them,
even though no one is claiming they're technological innovations.

Devices
like iPods that play digital audio files have been around for several
years. Toll-free audio lines have been used for decades by businesses
and at sporting events.

The real news is about innovations in
ministry. Nine of 10 Americans tell pollsters that faith matters to
them, but only four of 10 say they regularly attend services. Those
numbers have been stable for years, but clergy always are looking for
ways to close the gap. When new ideas work, the buzz spreads quickly.

The
Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit recently started audio podcasts of
devotional messages and talks of an upcoming reorganization of parishes.

In
Detroit, Greater Grace Temple has been a multimedia powerhouse for
decades, starting with radio in the 1970s, then moving into local TV
broadcasts and finally nationwide cable TV distribution. The church now
offers video clips on the Internet that can be viewed online but are
not compatible with iPod-style handheld devices.

"We haven't
tried podcasting, but we're thinking about it," said Melvin Epps,
director of communications at Greater Grace. "We want to see how it's
working in other places."

Over the years, the 6,500-member
Greater Grace has demonstrated how multimedia outreach can help to
build a congregation. Far-flung followers who tune into services from
outside Michigan now make up about 1,500 of the church's supporters,
Epps said.

"Every day, we're seen on the Word Network," Epps
said. "That's on major cable companies coast to coast, and that's
brought us a lot of people who feel they've adopted Greater Grace as
their home."

These TV followers occasionally send donations,
sometimes contact the church to ask for prayers and, once or twice a
year on average, visit Michigan to attend in person, Epps said.

At
Saline's much smaller Assembly of God, where about 140 people attend
Sunday services and the Wednesday youth service draws 40, the Rev.
Randy Bomey said he is not sure how many supporters their new iPod
audio service may draw.

"We're just thrilled to offer this to people like Josh DuBois," Bomey said.

Podcasting
is an inexpensive option for a small congregation, said Caleb Cohen,
the church's technology director. "It's easy to do. For a long time,
we'd been making audiotapes for people. Now, we just upload our audio
onto the Internet and people download the newest podcast whenever they
want."

The new toll-free telephone lines are more expensive.
Officials at Temple Beth El and at Congregation B'nai Moshe in West
Bloomfield, which offers a similar service to its members, declined to
say how much their systems cost. They try to limit the service to
members and their families, because the congregations pay a per-minute
fee for service.

"We'll say it's not inexpensive, but it is not
prohibitive, if a congregation wants to try this," Rabbi Daniel Syme at
Beth El said of the new system.

"What impresses us about this
idea is that we keep hearing from people that it's been a profoundly
moving experience for them," Syme said. "So far, that's far beyond the
impact we ever imagined."